


He Isn't Just Anything

by shadowhuntingdauntlessdemigod



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Beach Scene, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Gen, Missing Scene, slight romanogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 12:55:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19085485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowhuntingdauntlessdemigod/pseuds/shadowhuntingdauntlessdemigod
Summary: Missing scene from The Winter Soldier. Natasha finds Steve bleeding out on the shores of the Potomac and with help not coming fast enough, she tries to keep him alive while also coming to realize that maybe he means more to her than she initially thought.





	He Isn't Just Anything

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically a missing scene from CAWS since I'm a sucker for Romanogers. Previously posted over on fan fiction, but I edited it a bunch since it was five years old and mirrored it over here. Some slight descriptions of injuries/blood, but nothing graphic or more than canon-level. Enjoy!

Natasha hated sand. Even more so now that she had been trekking in it for the past hour. Her feet were beyond sore from running all day and now sand was stuck in her boots. Great, just great, but she didn’t stop to take them off. There were much more pressing matters at hand.

The helicarriers went down a little over an hour ago and no one had heard from Steve since. Natasha was scouring the beaches while Fury and Sam went to take care of any unfinished business inside what remained of the S.H.I.E.L.D headquarters, namely tracking down rogue HYDRA operatives.

“Steve!” she yelled again, her voce growing raw from yelling so much. How many freaking sandy beaches were there in Washington D.C? Apparently enough to hide a super soldier. “Steve!” Natasha kept walking, and maybe it was the exhaustion of the day getting to her, or the fact that the organization she had made a home around had crumbled from the inside, or that she had lost another teammate, but she found herself blinking to keep tears from forming.

_“You are an assassin. You have no emotions. He’s just a man,”_ she chided herself. Steve was a teammate, and they’d grown close, sure, but everything in her training and the walls the had built around herself was hesitant to let him be anything more. A noise stopped her thoughts in her tracks. A slight rustling, farther down the beach. It could be a HYRDA operative, but Natasha ran forward anyways, gun drawn at her side.

As she turned around a bush covered bend in the beach, she spotted Steve, wet and blood soaked on the sand. Something akin to hope sparked in her chest, but that was before she realized just _how much_ blood there was and how little movement from Steve accompanied it.

“Oh my God, Steve,” Natasha said quietly. She ran forward, holstering her gun as she did so, and skidded to a stop, her knees digging into the sand.

“Steve, look at me,” she pleaded.

Steve remained motionless on the sand, his chest moving slightly up and down, the only sign that he was alive. The sand beneath him was crimson. She pressed a hand to his throat, and while she found a pulse, it was slower than she was comfortable with. Even with the serum, Steve’s body was struggling to keep up with his injuries.

There were gunshot wounds to his shoulder, thigh, and stomach, and those were just the main ones she could see. She looked around and to her dismay found nothing that even her accomplished field medic training would allow her to use as some sort of medical instrument or bandage. For all she knew, he could be internally bleeding, or have head trauma, or broken bones-

“Stop worrying, Tasha,” Steve said so silently that she almost missed it.

“A little hard to do when you keep getting hurt. And, Tasha?” she asked, trying to crack a smile. It quickly faded. She realized how pale his face was, and even his eyes, which were cracked open, were a dull blue. Not the vibrant blue she was used to.

A small smirk was all he was able to muster, but that quickly turned into a wince as he coughed. Blood flecked his lips, probably from an internal lung wound. She chalked up probably broken ribs and punctured lung to the running list of what was wrong with him.

Natasha couldn’t lie to herself, it hurt the deepest parts of her soul to see him like this. Even if she’d never say it out loud, he was a pillar. During the war, in New York, and even now, something always standing tall and strong for others to follow into the fight. He wasn’t meant to be broken, lying on a beach because he’d tried to help both the world and his former best friend.

“Stay with me, Steve, you’re going to be just fine.” Her voice was masked in the type of pure calm that only came from internal worry.

She moved one hand to his abdomen to hopefully slow the bleeding and moved the other to the comm she had in her ear.

“This is Fury,” Nick stated once Natasha had gotten connection. It crackled ever so slightly but thankfully held.

“I found Steve. He’s on one of the beaches east of the compound. He’ll need a med evac,” she said, trying to keep that calm from wavering. _“He’s just a soldier,”_ she reminded herself. _“Soldiers get hurt all the time.”_

“Give us twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes?” Natasha exclaimed, trying to not raise her voice too much and risk worrying Steve further. “Fury, you gotta be faster than that.”

“We lost all of our med carriers today. Once we get a lock on your location we’ll send what minimal trustworthy staff over we have, but you have to be patient,” Fury said.

Natasha grit her teeth. “Just hurry,” was all she said before she turned the comm off and put her hand on top of the other.

“Bad news?” Steve asked quietly, looking at her through half-lidded eyes.

“No, no. Everything’s going to be fine. They’ll be here in a few minutes,” Natasha said smoothly.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Steve commented. Damn him for turning her own words back on her. As she watched, his eyes began to slip closed.

“Steve, keep your eyes open. Steve.”

“Just…takin’ a breather,” he said, voice hoarser than before.

“Eyes on me, Rogers. You need to stay awake,” Natasha dropped her tone of voice, deadly serious, and pressed down harder. Blood flowed and covered the crevices in her hands. _“He may be a soldier, but he’s still human.”_ Human meant mortal, which meant death would eventually come for him. But it couldn’t be that day, not on the beach.

Steve didn’t even wince when she applied pressure to the wound. His eyes were closed now, his breathing even shallower, which shouldn’t have been possible.

“Steve, you will not leave me here alone on this beach.” He didn’t reply, and she found herself counting his breaths trying to make sure that he was actually still alive. Natasha wondered how much time had passed. Ten minutes? Five? Two? She had no watch or any way to tell the time. She adjusted her position to be more comfortable and kept her hands pressed to Steve’s wound.

_“What if he dies before help arrives?”_ the little voice in the back of her head nagged at her. Then she would feel responsible for his death. She didn’t find him fast enough, help enough, get him to actual help in time…Another name among the hundreds of people that haunted her nightmares. _“He’s just a friend. Friends help each other through tough times. I’ll help him through this. He’ll be fine.”_

“Natasha?” She was startled by his sudden speaking. His eyes were closed and his chapped lips were partially parted.

“Yeah?” she asked, matching his quiet tone.

“I want you to find Bucky for me.”

If there was one thing Natasha Romanoff did not tolerate, it was the last wish of a dying man. Clint had tried it a few times, even after he knew how much it shook her to her core, but he was still there. Steve wasn’t doing this, not now, not to her, asking her to find the man that did this too him when he wouldn’t be able to do it himself.

“Alright. I’ll help you once you’re better,” she replied. Because he’d be fine, she’d make sure of it.

“No, now,” he said as forcefully as he could. Blood dripped out of the side of his mouth. “He saved me, he’s hurt, he can’t be far.”

“I am not leaving you,” Natasha said. As hard as she tried not to, tears came to her eyes. She wasn’t going anywhere, even when the only thing she could do was in fruitless attempt to keep his blood where it belonged. _“He’s just a teammate.”_

“Bucky was always there for me. I wasn’t there for him when they hurt him.” His quiet, half delirious words stopped for a moment and his brow tightened ever so slightly.“Or when they wiped his memory. I need someone to be there for him now.”

Go figure, what sounded like Captain America’s last words were him asking for someone to be taken care of. If he weren’t currently bleeding out, she’d call him out on his predictability.

“He’ll know someone’s with him if you stay with me. He’ll trust you, Steve, we can bring him in and help him together, but you need to be here to do it,” Natasha replied. In her concentration to get across to Steve that no, she wasn’t leaving, she hadn’t noticed the way her eyes had gotten how and were brimming with tears. Before she could stop it, one fell and landed on Steve’s hand.

He didn’t even need to have his eyes open to know what was happening. She watched as his right hand very slowly came up to cover her own that were stuck in their position on his stomach. “It’ll be okay,” he whispered.

“I know. It had better. But I’m still making you pay for this, Rogers,” she tried to tease, putting her defense mechanisms back into place the second her wall started to crack. She was rewarded with a slight upturn of the corner of Steve’s mouth, but that was all. In the next moment, his features slackened and he slipped into unconsciousness.

Natasha moved one hand out from under his own away from his wound and pressed it to his neck. His pulse was slower than it had been before, and would have been unsustainable for a normal person. She took her fingers off his neck, leaving bloody prints there, and returned them to their original position, mentally cursing Fury for not hurrying up.

“Stay with me Steve,” she begged. _“He’s just a hero. Heroes die for what they believe in,”_ the voice piped up again.

Natasha shook her head against it and let out an angry sigh, the most she could do without screaming at the universe that deemed this was alright. “You’re gonna be just fine,” she kept assuring, the calm stoicism lost in the realization that she really, truly cared whether he lived or died.

He wasn’t _just_ anything, despite what everything in her head tried to tell her.

Whether it was just reflex or some small rousing of consciousness, Steve’s fingers tightened slightly against hers.

“I am not losing you. Not now, not ever,” she said to him. Before this, she didn’t know how much she cared for him, more than just as a man, soldier, teammate, or hero, but as a person. Hell, she didn’t know that she could care that much for one person.

But Steve Rogers, the exact opposite of everything that made her up, didn’t fit into one of the neat little boxes that she tried to put everyone else in to make her life and her job easier. She’d do whatever it took to keep him alive.

Just on a whim, she bent down and placed a soft kiss on his wet forehead.

She pulled back after a second, not moving her hands. She continued to sit on the sand and wait for help to arrive, his hand remained loosely interlocked with hers being a constant reminder that he was still there and breathing, and she’d make sure it stayed that way.

 


End file.
